Ivy Compton-Burnett is a strikingly original novelist, writing conversation-novels in which talk is the medium and subject. She is innovative like Joyce and Woolf but more accessible and less theoretical, a modernist unawares. She makes readers think and her terse cool witty style reminds us that the novel is an art. To read most living writers of fiction after reading her is to feel novelists have become lazy and made their readers lazy. She requires attention, and she doesn't write to pass the time or invite identification, but she is amusing and challenging.This re-valuation of a neglected artist is a close analysis of forms, ideas and language in novels which range from her first conventionally moral love-story, Dolores, which she tried to suppress, to startling stories about landed gentry in Victorian and Edwardian England.

Product Description: This title, first published in 1970, consists of essays on the individual tales and novels of George Eliot, with two general essays that discuss the novels as a whole and cuts across the individual works. The primary concern of these studies is to see what the limits of George Eliot’s greatness are, to consider the purpose and end of the technical brilliance, and to attend to what she has to say to us across a century of change and developing historical and psychological consciousness...read more

Product Description: In this substantial essay on the novel (first published in 1964) Barbara Hardy distinguishes three integral aspects of the art of fiction – story, the working-out of a moral problem, and "truthfulness", defined as "the lively representation of reality"...read more

Product Description: In the title essay, Professor Hardy argues for the special advantage of lyric over other other literary genres in conveying intense private feelings publicly. She then gives detailed consideraton to the lyric poetry of John Donne, Arthur Hugh Clough, and a group of poets central to the modernist canon: Hopkins, Yeats, Aden, Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath...read more

Product Description: Charles Dickens's experience and imagining of creativity is at the heart of his self-awareness, subject-matter and narrative. His intelligence works intuitively rather than conceptually and ideas about imagination often emerge informally in personal letters and implicitly through characters, language and story...read more

Product Description: 'a genuinely interesting contribution to George Eliot scholarship by one of the leading postwar critics of Victorian fiction. The conception is bold and arresting. . . it reads excellently but its clarity is also vivid, effective and engaging...read more

Product Description: Encompassing experiences from the 1920s to the 1940s, this powerful childhood memoir focuses on one woman's upbringing in industrial South Wales. With vivid accounts of the two World Wars, a Baptist household, and an elementary school education, this powerful account is grouped thematically to reveal thoughts on family life and the compelling influences of culture, politics, religion, and love in one Welsh community in the early 20th century...read more

Product Description: Dylan Thomas's expressive, highly imaginative re-creation of forms and language intimately portrays his inner self and his time, earning him renown as one of the "great individualists of modern art." In this contemplative, focused study of poems, stories and other works by Thomas, including Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and Under Milk Wood, Barbara Hardy emphasizes his creative achievements and high intelligence, analyzing his regional identity; response to other writers, especially James Joyce; modernist style; subject matter; use of language; and themes of art and the natural world...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The noted British literary scholar turns her attention to the rarely examined topic of narrative in the plays and offers some new insight into the playwright's craft. Shakespeare makes narrative theatrical and it is as prominent in his craft and language as characterization and imagery...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Hardy's light touch and her effortless rendering of characters who naturally weave literature into their romances make her novel a bright, intelligent read."" Publishers Weekly ""Above and beyond its ambitious structure, this polished novel of sex, love, and literature is poignant and engagingly romantic...read more

Product Description: This analysis of themes and conventions in the major Victorian novel pays particular attention to the novelist’s self-conscious use of art as moral and psychological inquiry. Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, and George Eliot are just some of the authors who are discussed in depth...read more

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Product Description: A Reading of Jane Austen (first published by Peter Owen in 1975) has established itself with critics and readers as an outstanding contribution to the growing literature on this author, full of fresh and stimulating perceptions. Central to the word is Bar